Photo by Nina Zafar / Gabriella Lujan says creating the altar for Mount Pleasant’s Day of the Dead is a long process. She spends months creating unique pieces for the intricate display. But for Lujan, it’s worth all the hard work to orchestrate events that bring the Latino community together.

| By Nina Zafar and Devan Kaney |

Mount Pleasant has been one of Washington, D.C.’s longtime Latino centers, but the neighborhood has changed drastically over the past 20 years.

In the 1970s Mount Pleasant and Adams Morgan were recognized as the heart of the Latino community in D.C. Seemingly, in recent years as housing prices rise, many of those who came here in the 1970s and 80s are opting for Virginia and Maryland suburbs as reasonably priced alternatives.

Quique Aviles grew up between Adams Morgan and Mount Pleasant and is now a one of the neighborhood’s prominent members when it comes to keeping the Latino influence alive.

“I’ve been involved in the community for 35 years, I grew up here. We don’t live here in Mount Pleasant anymore because we got basically gentrified out. It got too expensive to live here,” Aviles said. “But this is our hub; you know it’s our community.”

Elementary students in Petworth struggle to achieve with limited resources in the classroom and at home as the block-to-block the income of white residents has increased and the income of black families has fallen over the last two and a half decades.

Petworth, a neighborhood that runs against the border of Northeast D.C., is home to nine schools and over 2,000 school age children, according to 2010 U.S. Census data. A majority of students in Petworth’s elementary schools are economically disadvantaged.

Raymond Education Campus, a kindergarten through eighth grade school in Petworth, is not just a place to learn; it’s become a place of refuge for its students, said school social worker Tarianda Ruston.

“The kids are very resilient despite the challenges they face at home or lack [of] necessity,” Ruston said. “They really love coming to school.”

The school works in partnership with a program called “Neediest Kids.” If students do not have clothes, shoes or food, the school can provide those items, according to Ruston. Raymond faculty and staff have been able to provide gift cards to stores such as Target and Wal-Mart, and uniforms are given to students as needed, according to Ruston.

The Pamunkey Tribe has one of the oldest reservations in the Unites States and is the first of six Virginia tribes to receive Federal acknowledgement. On July 2, 2015, the Bureau of Indian Affairs confirmed Pamunkey as the nation’s 567th Federally Recognized tribe.

“I’m just glad to be here to introduce Pamunkey Tribe,” Assistant Chief Robert Gray said in an July interview filmed for FNX | First Nations Experience.

However, his eagerness to implement health, education, and housing housing improvement programs for tribal members was halted when Stand Up California, an anti-Indian gaming nonprofit filed a challenge to BIA’s decision on October 8, last day of the appeals period.

Manassas is a small, yet growing city in Virginia that has experienced a lot of change over the years. This makes Hispanics the largest represented minority in the predominantly white city. Manassas is a small with a population around 30 thousand, but the Hispanic community has doubled in the last decade alone, and it now makes up a third of the population. Thus, as the Hispanic influence has grown, many services and businesses have begun to cater to Spanish speakers.

Osvaldo Mercado sat in his glass office in Union Hispana Multi-services LLC, and repeatedly asked me “Why are we not having this conversation in Spanish?” To which I would reply that my Spanish skills are not very strong, and that I would be more comfortable doing the interview in English.

Mercado was clearly disappointed as he shook his head and explained, “Americans don’t realize that Spanish will soon be the No. 1 language. We all need to learn Spanish to co-exist.”

According to the 2014 Manassas Key Demographics, almost 30 percent of all Manassas residents speak Spanish; however, over 62 percent of residents only speak English. With more than 37 million speakers, the Pew Research Center says that Spanish is by far the most spoken non-English language in the U.S. today among people 5 and up. It is also one of the fastest-growing languages with the number of speakers up 233 percent since just 1980.

Chris Medina (right) came to Manassas a couple of years ago, as part of a demographic shift that dramatically increased the area’s Latino population over 30 percent in the last couple of years.

Chris Medina has now established her own small business, C&T that sells locally grown seasonal vegetables, and is a well-known vendor in the Greater Manassas Farmers Market.

For many, the city of Manassas is not just a municipality on the map of the Prince William County in Northern Virginia. The citizens of “Old Town,” as it is described, have grown as a community after years of tension surrounding immigration issues in the area.

The Migrant Heritage Commission is a non-profit, service-oriented organization that recognizes and preserves the cultural identity and rights of Filipino immigrants, grew from this moment of need. It has since grown to serve the growing and geographically scattered Filipino immigrant community across the D.C. Metro area in a wide variety of ways, from cultural education for the second generation to aiding victims of human trafficking.

The sign for Gala Theatre illuminated on 14th Street at night. / Photo provided by GalaTheatre.

At the age of 12, Chris Sánchez didn’t speak a word of Spanish.

He also didn’t have a relationship with his own Latino heritage, according to his theater teachers.

All this changed when Chris Sánchez got involved with the Gala Hispanic Theatre in Washington, D.C. What started as a casual interest grew into a full-blown passion, thanks to the theater’s Paso Nuevo Youth Program.

Now, at the age of 19, Sánchez has become an accomplished playwright, actor, stagehand and engineer. This year, he went with his peers to the White House to receive an award from Michelle Obama on behalf of the program that launched his creative career.

“Once I got involved with Paso Nuevo, I fell in love with theater,” Sánchez said.

The program, which provides low-income and at-risk Latino youth a space to delve into the performing arts, is one of the many ways that the Gala Theatre keeps culture alive in the District.

U-Street corridor jazz clubs gave rise to the music that defined a generation and a neighborhood. Identified as the nation’s largest urban African American community in the mid-1900s, the music in the clubs exemplified the people’s struggle.

There were many simultaneous developments of jazz in other American cities, such as New York and New Orleans. However, Washington, D.C. was one of the prominent centers as far back as the 1800s.

Dr. Sabiyha Prince, cultural anthropologist and scholar said that the impacts of gentrification on the U Street area left the African Americans a minority and those demographic changes had an influence on the performance culture.

Although the population on U Street is no longer primarily black, there are still live jazz performances at clubs like Blues Alley and Bohemian Caverns. Also, this club landscape has expanded to new spots like Sotto, a relatively new underground bar on 14th street.